Cynthia Erivo Bringing Hit Podcast CARRIER To Screens

Hot off her two Oscar nominations for Harriet - and Tony, Emmy, and Grammy wins for the stage musical of The Color Purple - and an acclaimed role on HBO's hit miniseries The Outsider - Cynthia Erivo has set up her next project. According to Deadline, Amblin Partners has bought the film rights to Dan Blank's sci-fi thriller podcast Carrier, with Erivo set to reprise her leading role.

Carrier sees Erivo playing a truck driver who takes an under-the-table long-haul job, and quickly finds that the unknown cargo she's hauling is both dangerous and highly sought-after by mysterious forces. Esquire named it one of the best podcasts of 2019, while Apple went even further to dub it the Best Fiction Show of the Year. Though I've only listened to a couple of episodes of the show (and did so for this news article), I can confirm that Carrier is cinematic as hell, and that it sets up quite the harrowing mystery.

Carrier will be Erivo's first outing as a producer, and Blank's first as a feature writer-director. Also on Erivo's slate are Doug Liman's sci-fi film Chaos Walking, alongside Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley; and another sci-fi film, Needle in a Timestack, by 12 Years A Slave writer John Ridley. Both films have completed production. As for Blank: he's got a bunch of projects out there, but his short film Monster Roll is probably most relevant to his directing chops.

Have you listened to Carrier? I'm certainly intrigued; the flourishing of the podcast industry has allowed a lot of stories to be told in a radio-play-esque fashion, and I'm delighted that that form has made a return. QCode, the studio originally responsible for Carrier, apparently has more screen adaptations of its podcasts in the works - so there's more to come.

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Andrew is a New Zealand-born writer, filmmaker, and theatre practitioner who sometimes lives in Canada. He can be read at Birth.Movies.Death., SlashFilm, IGN, Polygon, and elsewhere. His favourite movie is MIRACLE MILE, his favourite band is the Manic Street Preachers, and his favourite commenters are the ones who read the article first.